Romney's Experts, Whose Advice He Ignores

Nothing captures the artifice of election year politics quite like the rush of policy experts who attach themselves to presidential campaigns every four years. Star economists, foreign policy grandees, and respected lawmakers lend their gravitas and intellectual credentials to a nominee’s policy platform. Most of them wind up getting little face time with the candidate and find their ideas marginalized by political pros fixated on securing 270 electoral votes—not the intricacies of net neutrality and fracking regulations.

So imagine what it’s like to be an economic adviser for Mitt Romney right about now. Among the financial and business luminaries helping the campaign are R. Glenn Hubbard, dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business, and Harvard University’s N. Gregory Mankiw, both economists who headed the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush. Rounding out the team are former Missouri Senator Jim Talent and onetime Minnesota Representative Vin Weber, now Republican lobbyists.(Weber is a member of Bloomberg Government’s Advisory Board.) There’s plenty of career-boosting cachet for these unpaid advisers—and maybe even a plum job should Romney prevail. Yet trying to school the candidate on economics can be challenging. He’s got a gold-plated résumé of his own (Bain Capital co-founder, Harvard business and law degrees) and opinions based on decades of experience. “Given what he’s done in the business world, he knows what he believes works,” says Andrew Puzder, chief executive officer of Carpinteria (Calif.)-based CKE Restaurants, who helped craft Romney’s business-regulation policy. “And sometimes he knows better than the policy team.”